How Long Is the Night

Originally Aired: October 13, 1952

Suspense #482, "How Long Is the Night," presents the harrowing true story of a man stranded alone on a desolate Pacific island in the aftermath of atomic bomb testing. Warner, a military photographer, recounts the weeks he and his team spent documenting the devastating effects of nuclear tests at Eniwetok Atoll. Along with cameramen Joe Harrison and Bert Picelli, Warner has witnessed the islands transformed into a chain of black, radioactive ruins where nothing can survive. The smell of death hangs over the water and land as they photograph the scorched remains of what was once a living ecosystem.

On their final assignment, the three men land on Island 27 with their Geiger counters and camera equipment to document the contaminated wasteland. The radiation levels are alarmingly high, even for an area on the fringe of the blast zone. As they split up to cover different sections of the three-square-mile island, Warner has no idea that something is about to go terribly wrong, leaving him alone in a world of the dead where every moment could be his last.